Crime and Nourishment: From Tihar’s thali to UK’s drone-fed jails, a tale of curious priorities

WITH NON-SPICY pasta at the top of contemporary concerns in Tihar jail, spare a thought for our once mighty English empirewallahs who nobly bore the white man’s burden from Calcutta, city of the dreadful night, declared Oxford Street to be a nonpareil exemplar for every town centre in the world, and delivered tough-scold lectures on law and order as the framework of modern civilisation.

Boris Johnson, the third of Britain’s seven consecutive failed prime ministers (a world record in democracy), once addressed the two great social crises of 21st-century England, homelessness and lawlessness, with characteristic radical elasticity: “The trouble with all these blokes is that sometimes you can’t tell whether the homeless ought to be in prison or prisoners who ought to be homeless.”

Boris Johnson is famous as a high priest of droll wit, but his logic was immaculate. Living alfresco on cold, rainy, gusty British streets is surely a far sterner punishment than life in a warm prison with assured meals and all the conveniences of corruption, like a regular supply of illegal drugs available at your cell window on payment by card transported by a very modern drone.

The British solution to their epochal social crises was an imaginative variation of the Boris recipe, first implemented in the reign of the fifth failed prime minister. Faced with rising lawlessness and consequent prison overcrowding, they simply released old prisoners to make way for new prisoners. They did not build new prisons, since the British government had run out of the money needed to finance law and order. They decriminalised theft. If you go to Oxford Street or any other tourist-haven police station to complain that your expensive watch or your mobile phone has been stolen in broad daylight, the chap in uniform will roar with laughter if he is honest, or turn the other way if polite. Problem solved, till the next failed prime minister.

The government, always impelled by advocates of social justice, improved the wellbeing of prison inmates by ensuring that pleasures available to high rollers should also be the fundamental right of jailbirds unfortunate enough to be sentenced to jail. There was no reason for them to suffer deprivation when millions of their compatriots were fearlessly busy making money from the greatest modern multinational, the drugs trade. The British do not like discrimination. If you can get drugs outside jail easily, you should get drugs inside jail easily too.

A recent report in the London newspaper Sunday Times has revealed that British drug syndicates are flying drones “with impunity” into some prisons whose “residents” can “just pick from a menu of almost any drug”. It is a super-efficient service, the envy of any corporation.

Keys are smuggled into prisons to allow customers to open windows so that they can collect drugs as well as social necessities like trainer shoes and clothing. The investigative story is accompanied by pictures of contraband in packages, sometimes hidden in bin bags because rubbish is cleared fitfully. All very Dickensian. Trust Iran and Ukraine to waste their drones on war; the British, being legendary shopkeepers, use them for healthy profit.

British law has removed dread of death by human diktat from the prison experience. Once upon a time, you could be marched off from gaol to the chopping block or the gallows. Till 1988, treason was a hanging offence, unless you had studied at Cambridge University, in which case you were allowed to retire in Moscow if exposed, or permitted to work as curator of the Queen’s gallery if suspicion did not culminate in confession. This was part of the perks of the Establishment. The privilege of a chopped head was reserved for those few royals who believed that conspiracy or rebellion could make them a monarch. Hanging was more democratic, and quite a spectacle with cheering crowds, but that was before cinema arrived to fill any holiday with vast quantities of gore. With the last execution in 1964 and the death penalty abolished in 1969, imprisonment became a calendar event.

We are still old-fashioned in India and so have old-fashioned problems. The impressively named American Matthew Aaron VanDyke, arrested by the National Intelligence Agency in March along with six Ukrainians for smuggling arms across the Myanmar border, was sent to Tihar. He has filed an appeal in the Patiala court. He wants a personal stove and utensils so that he can cook his own pasta because he cannot stomach the “spicy oily deep-fried and greasy” thaali full of roti, rice and vegetables served in jail.

I can see the sense in being one’s own cook. Give an Indian to cook pasta and he will certainly make it spicy, oily, deep-fried and greasy, with ghee on the side. Matthew is very happy to pay any extra costs. He is quite happy to pay for the pasta, utensils and stove. We now know what at least some of the Ukrainians do with the guns gifted by allies to fight Russia. They smuggle them to any market in the world. It can certainly pay for pasta, and a stove.

ung Matthew must have been eating nothing but pasta after he landed in India on a tourist visa, went to Mizoram via Guwahati without a permit, and then on to Myanmar without the formality of a visa, to train rebels and facilitate drone consignments from Europe. There lies the script for the next version of Dhurandhar, waiting to be made; with a hunger strike as a climax.

Matthew claims that he has lost 14kg in Tihar because of his hunger strike in protest against a thaali. This, if my rough calculation is right, is longer than any fast by Mahatma Gandhi. Poor Matthew: it’s tough being a terrorist. Perhaps he expected an American diet in Tihar. If he had been caught training rebels in Texas, his breakfast in jail would have been eggs, cheese, potato burrito, cereal, fruit and coffee; lunch would be BBQ pulled pork, beans, bread and milk. Dinner would have been beef, dirty rice, beans, a vegetable, bread and milk. Matthew would have put on weight.

If he had been sent to a London jail, he would have got drugs. Matthew would have lost weight.

Consider this: how would the world media have reacted to a story that drones were supplying drugs through windows at Tihar? Solemn cameras from across the world would whir outside the prison gates while anchors intoned, in the company of Indian specialists, that law and order had collapsed. When it happens in England, ho-hum… and the next story please, preferably about another failed prime minister.

A RECENT BOOK HAS corrected one major perspective error by pointing out that the Second World War began in 1931 with the Japanese invasion of China, not in 1939 with the German invasion of Poland. Conflicts inflicted by imperialists and fascists in Asia, Africa and Europe conflated to create a world war for fifteen years. I have not read this book about the devastating decade between 1931 and 1941, but a few facts gleaned from a review might convince us that history is determined by conscious barbarians and fallible dictators as much as the genius democrats. A sample:

Chinese suffering after the Japanese invasion of 1931 can barely be described without an overwhelming sense of trauma and shame at the descent of human behaviour when lost in the mania of supremacism. In 1933, cannibalism was rife in Ukraine when 3.3 million died because of starvation. There was such despair in America during the Great Depression that in 1931, 100,000 Americans applied to the Communist Soviet Union for jobs. Between 1929 and 1933, the number of jobs in Germany nearly halved, which explains the ascent of Hitler, who cut youth unemployment by 63 per cent in his first year in power. Hitler wanted to kill between 20 to 30 million Slavs during the war to increase food supplies to the Germans. In June 1938, Chiang Kai-shek destroyed the Yellow River dams killing 800,000 of his own people in an effort to prevent the Japanese advance. Stalin’s grievous mistake was to disbelieve Soviet agents who informed him from Berlin about the impending German invasion of the Soviet Union. His remark on file is unprintable. Hitler’s genocide against Jews, killing six million, and the Bengal famine, with an estimated three million starvation deaths, occurred after 1941.

Perhaps the last word should be left to Clementine, the Churchill with greater moral clarity. Winston’s wife was a member of the Royal Commission in 1937 on social conditions in the West Indies. She wrote contemptuously from the colony in the Atlantic to her husband: “This is a sample of the British Empire upon which the sun never sets!”